After receiving her BA at New York University’s Gallatin School for Independent Study, Emily Berçir Zimmerman acted in various roles for adventurous non-profit arts organizations in New York, including Location One and Creative Time. Emily co-curated Hyper-runt with Ebon Fisher in 2004 and curated the online exhibition Alphaville Under Construction in 2005 for InLiquid. From 2005 to 2007 she attended the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where she presented her thesis exhibition From Rest to Rest, which examined the relationship between embodiment and digital media through the work of four artists—Ricci Albenda, Peter Campus, David Rokeby, and Peter Rose.

Emily is currently Assistant Curator at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), where she curated Slow Wave: Seeing Sleep, a three-day festival devoted to the art and science of sleep, and Uncertain Spectator, an exhibition examining anxiety in contemporary art. Emily was named best emerging curator by the Metroland, and in 2011 awarded a curatorial residency at Space Bandee in Busan, Korea. She was named a 2011-2012 Loris Ledis Curatorial Fellow at BRIC Contemporary Art, where she showed So To Speak, which traveled to the Arts Center of the Capital Region in 2013.